Search results

I once ran a campaign in a region based on the Philippines. It worked very well, and the reason was that I'd spent two years there as a missionary. Because I was familiar with the culture, conditions, and legends, I could put together a very authentic feeling experience with little work on my...

No. In D&D damage is just a scratch, but spells can have a significant effect on your pc e.g. hold, sleep, petrify, slow, etc etc.

Why? Psychology. When an enemy takes an action that can wreck a PC and there's not a thing the player can do about it, that's severely un-fun. Helplessness sucks. When the player rolls a save, at least he feels like he can do something to prevent being hurt. Mechanically it's the same, but...

Mechanically the idea seems sound, but in terms of what stats actually mean, I'd prefer to use wisdom. Initiative is about quickly making a correct judgement based on limited information, which is more of a wisdom thing.

I don't have a fantasy suggestion, but in case you're interested in SF, Ill offer LBB (original) Traveller as an idea. It fits that playstyle the best of anything I've tried.

Croaker from the Black Company books is the example that always comes to my mind first. There are plenty of others. Unfortunately the 4E warlord fits the characters I think of as warlords quite poorly. I've always considered the 4E warlord a good idea poorly implemented.

I like the idea quite a lot. Anything that substitutes narrative for numbers improves my immersion. The record keeping seems trivial - a sheet with character names across the top and running totals of their hp underneath. I expect I could do it quicker than telling the player and making sure...

This makes the book a definite no-buy for me.

The OP is absolutely correct. Balance. which is most commonly argued in the form of dps/dpr, becomes less important with greater independence. It doesn't matter as much that guy 1 is doing X while guy 2 is doing Y when both are necessary for the party's success. Balance can only become a...

I'd expect strength to influence longbow accuracy a lot. In combat you don't just pull & shoot. You look for the right shot, which means holding your pull while you get on target and wait for the right opportunity. I shoot a 90 pound compound bow, usually at a target, and I usually have the...

As written there's no way to balance it. There has to be some kind of limit on how many infused items you can have, which means some kind of bookkeeping. Two ways come to mind. The first, which I've use, is that it costs gold to infuse an item, which makes treasure awarded by the DM the...

This is the "decker issue" from games like Shadowrun. Nothing at all to do with spotlight balance.

I voted "Tyranny of Balance." The only kind of balance I care about is "spotlight balance," which means everyone has something useful to do most of the time, and everyone gets to shine and be the best at the task at hand once in a while. This is a DMing issue rather than a rules issue. I've...

Yeah, if you look in a dictionary, "stats", short for "statistics" of course, is just a number. However in RPG terms IME it pretty much always means ability scores, so unless the OP states otherwise, I'll regard the use of ability scores as the question on the table. Let's not get sidetracked...

I like stats but they're not necessary. You can also make a more or less exhaustive list of things you want to do in the game and give each one a numerical value, e.g. fight - 7, schmooze - 3, drive - 8, etc. The exact list will depend greatly on the genre of the game. For the games that do...

This was me too.

IMO the relationship between lore and rules is pretty simple. Lore defines genre, setting, and game activities. The job of the rules is to mechanically implement the lore insofar is it is reasonably possible for a game. It's never going to perfect, and if you can't accept that you're going to...

Awesome idea. I've nothing to add, but please come back to the boards and let us know how it turns out after you've tried it.

No for me. Forgotten Realms is fine as a campaign setting, but pretty unexceptional. I find it kind of boring. The necessary parts are well covered in mechanics-independent books from previous editions. Since Wizards has such a limited release schedule, I'd rather they put the resources into...

That's not metagaming. Making decisions based on the game fiction, even if one is mistaken about the game fiction, is the opposite of metagaming.